I was told that players can't just make up guards and have them around but need to have kingdom resources dedicated to it and assigned by the ruler or else everyone would be walking around with 100 guards all the time...

If staff could consult and give a final verdict on this I think that would help a lot, its hard to know what staff have changed when they don't tell us...

Talented people often end up collecting retainers, assistants, and other such people to help them do their things. We even see this with some of the simple low income hermits. Just be reasonable. I wouldn't expect every Tom, Dick, and Harry to have an entourage of 50 men armed to the teeth following them around everywhere (how would you feed them all?!), but it makes sense if you had a few hands helping you out.

The way I look at it, if there isn't a hard and fast rule literally written on it, just use a pinch a common sense. If you want a gruff burly man with a big sword to follow you around and keep you company, that's cool. If you expect a fully outfitted tactical team to follow you everywhere and protect you from everything Heaven and man can divine, that's probably a bit much.

I put the whole bodyguard idea in here because there is nothing that really covers it in the rules and it is yet another grey area that the players have to tip toe on without knowing what is acceptable or not. It was also not intended to be a discussion or a Q/A thread, ( but i dont mind at all) it was to be in the wishlist because it was thought upon as a new concept for non rulers to have guards. Us being able to have actual defensible guards out of thin air as long as we slap them in an RP is new to me. My guess is even some staff don't even know what is OK in this regard. I mean, your asking us to use common sense on this issue, but we have nothing really to go by, other than not being able to have guards unless they came from a kingdoms resources, which doesn't make sense if we are only asking for 1-5 loyal and dependable PERSONAL guards, not 100-500 and not kingdom guards. The bodyguard idea is not about having an entourage, but a few skilled and statted dependable retainers to help protect us and perhaps be used in other ways possibly. The idea for me is to have a legitimate bodyguard who i can use in RP situations, give a name and history, give some stats and develop through PT's and maybe even give an item or two (but i didnt discuss that). Sort of like a statless NPC...except with some stats...that i can lightly develop.

Why does this or anything regarding bodyguards for non rulers differ from what the staff are now saying? Basically the reasons Xeni pointed out.

Xeni said...

I was told that players can't just make up guards and have them around but need to have kingdom resources dedicated to it and assigned by the ruler or else everyone would be walking around with 100 guards all the time...

If staff could consult and give a final verdict on this I think that would help a lot, its hard to know what staff have changed when they don't tell us...

First, I understand the bodyguard thing is an idea at this point. Even I can tell you it won't show in V6 simply because it's way too late in the development cycle to try to add it. Keep it in your back pocket, develop it, and raise it for V7.

Second, I don't understand where you guys got the notion that non-rulers couldn't have a statless NPC bodyguard. No one has ever told me that. Maybe you're reaching farther back than I've been around, but I never understood that to be a hard and fast rule.

The Statless NPC section in Ch. 3 is pretty vague. I imagine that's sort of the point, you don't necessarily want to stifle what can be awesome. It just needs to be laid out as a thing and certain things need to be labelled as abuses and no-nos. Bodyguards don't make an appearance.

But Statless Bodyguards as a thing have come up recently.

Troops, guards, and bodyguards are assumed not to exist with you unless you are a ruler or have established their presence through roleplay.

Yup! That spiffy new RP Guide that started all of this. It notes that a Ruler is just sort of expected to have it, but there's an or listed to give anyone a chance to benefit from the same thing. Just talk about them. Recognize them as a thing. Through our words, our characters and baubles exist. If you need more than what feels normal, there's something for that too. Under the counter-plotting section of the same post, Zan Zhikun is said to hire a bunch of goons to be her posse! I dunno how feasible it would be to carry it as a long running Counter Plot (that's not really a thing anymore), but avenues are available for your everyday non-ruling probably unimportant officer to hire some extra goons when you plan to go someplace potentially unhealthy.

Is there a hard rule on it? Well, no. Not yet anyway. As I said before, I don't remember one existing previously either. If I were playing an officer, I wouldn't expect to want more than a couple guys with me on a general basis, so just try to keep it around 2 of the build Mat quoted earlier if having a fixed number makes it easier. Talk to the guys. Buy them a drink at Ye Olde Taverne. Tell them to watch your six while you sing songs with children or whatever.

It wasn't so much a "set in stone" rule but things that staff tossed about when the question or a situation came up.

A statless NPC or two? Sure, what staff have said in past versions was roughly "RP them regularly and make note that they are there before a situation happens and don't just drop out of nowhere that 'oh yeah I had these goons I never mentioned standing around this whole time' type thing..." So yeah a statless NPC or two you RP regularly (not just reference when your in trouble, or might soon be in it) then according to past comments thats cool.

Being followed around by dozens of fully armed and armored solders 24/7? Yeah no, you can't just magic up solders, ignore the fact that they need to eat/get paid, and forget that a colum of armed solders walking around town (much less standing around your tavern table) are going to scare the hell out of people and set the city guard on you in no time flat... I believe the situation in V3 that best fit this was a player was at the little RP Lake place and said he had a bunch of guards with him (I forget exactly how many but it was a few dozen) and staff said no go.

Now I'm totally cool with whatever staff decide to do, I just don't want us (the playerbase) to get confused and do something against the rules or not have the ability to protect ourselves just because were were confused with conflicting statements. If the staff have changed their mind great, but those of us who have been around are going to go based on what was previously ok until told its changed and new people are probably just like "WTF?"

I wouldn't mind seeing something simple put in place, like being able to have a certain number of statless npcs based on your character's Cha score divided by 10 (or something like that).

Guards are certainly something that have the potential to be important, particular to shop owners. If you've got a shop full of swords and scrolls, and the only person defending it is a 75 War shopkeeper with no dueling skills, all it would take is a single PC to steal items when you're not looking, or just outright rob you at sword point. Guards would prevent this, naturally.

Hopefully this won't come up at all, though. It certainly shouldn't be considered a priority over most dev work.

You can't kill someone and take their items, so you could try to rob a shop but the owner would have to give you the stuff of his/her own will since if you killed them you wouldn't be able to take anything. So thats not a problem.

This is a Necro but as a former GM I agree with Aureal. In order for any kind of guard to be effective, they need to be posted in the biography well in advance of any future plot. You can not be walking around and pull random npc guards out of your ass in the middle of a plot. Any decent plot writer will take this into account and will either try to get you on your own or find some excuse to remove your guard in their plot/counterplot. And then it's into the hands of the dice.

However, in deciding how to handle guards, we (the staff) will look at your means. If you spent 500 gold on that spiffy new sword a week ago, chances are you don't have money to pay for any guards. We do our homework on plots.

That being said, I rarely even saw a case where a guard was present outside of merc corps or kingdom rulers. Generally high ranking officers might have statted soldiers from the KT present and to their disposal.

But this is SimRTK and stuff does happen. Be clever how you play and you will be surprised what you can do. We had a guy walk up to Li Ru in his own audience hall and injured him to Liu Cao level stats before getting ganked due to proper planning.

I would like to propose a change to Administrative actions in KT regarding the KT plots. Currently kingdoms are able to send officers to other kingdoms to perform acts that will directly degrade enemy capabilities such as Arson, Riot and Sap, which will have better results with relevant spy data. The damage dealt by these actions does differ, but what if a kingdom wanted to focus all of the damage on a specific area, rather than spread it out amongst different areas of targeting which would give less damage to perhaps an area they were only concerned about such as grain stores or damaging (even destroying) specific facilities?

Also would it be possible to propose an entirely new action in the KT plot area, which would require greater coordination and take more than one officer assigned to succeed? The action would be to destroy a specific facility, would require 3 officers. An office must have at least one of the following skills. Arson. Sap. Riot. and each would be assigned to one of those specific tasks to work in cohesion to distract, damage and burn a facility to the point where it is completely destroyed.

Stat lines would remain where they currently are, without any changes to what would be expected from someone performing the specified KT plots.

(I am hoping this is the kind of suggestion you were asking for, but if not could you give us an example of something you could expect one of us to submit here?)